Against Nature: Joris-Karl Huysmans (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

I knew what to expect going in, and was only pleasantly surprised at just how enjoyable an experience it proved to be. It essentially aspired to separate literature and art from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and morals being of secondary concern, if at all, led to the depiction of such depravities, and A Rebours was one of those books. Under the pretext of liberty and progress society had even discovered a means of aggravating the poor man’s miserable condition, by dragging him from his home, rigging him out in a ridiculous uniform, giving him his own weapons and brutalizing him under a system of slavery identical to that which it had, out of compassion, (abolished) in days gone by – all this to enable him to slaughter his neighbor without risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operate alone, without uniforms and with weapons that are less noisy and efficient. The term “bulimia” has existed long before the 20thC diagnosis, but it seems always to have referred to overeating, not so much craving or hunger.

In fact, perfumes are almost never produced from the flowers whose names they bear; the artist who dared to borrow only natural elements would produce nothing but a bastard work with neither authenticity or style, seeing as the essence obtained by the distillation of flowers offers only a very distant and imprecise analogy to the actual aroma of the living flower, as it disperses its effusions in the open air. As critics from all sides lambasted this book, and him for writing such a wretched thing, one critic stood out to him by simply saying, "After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol or the foot of the cross.The novel follows a young aristocrat named Jean Des Essientes who retreats from busy city life to a home in the country to spend the rest of his days pursuing aesthetic philosophy. Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray , Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics.

Europeans Are Kinky: Apart from some major-league womanising in his younger days, which ultimately bored him and turned him towards an aesthetic lifestyle, des Esseintes at one point seduces a female circus acrobat and also a woman who turns him on by using her skills as a professional ventriloquist to pretend that her husband is about to break in on them. And finally, weary to the point of satiety of these hackneyed luxuries, these commonplace caresses, he had sought satisfaction in the gutter, hoping that the contrast would revive his exhausted desires and imagining that the fascinating filthiness of the poor would stimulate his flagging senses. He decides to collect exotic flowers, which resemble diseased organs, alien entities, and strange sculpture.He exhaustively details how he chooses the colours of his rooms by comparing pigments under candlelight (orange is best), the furnishings, the pictures he hangs up, the music he enjoys (or rather, doesn’t enjoy). Perhaps true peace can only be found after knowing so much, yet understanding so little and finally being able to ask the right questions. While McGuinness's intro makes a good case for "Against the Grain" as a better title, beware of the Dover edtion under that name: it's old and expurgated, as is the illustrated one from the '30s). Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. A Rebours ( Against the Grain), an aesthetic novel written by the French author Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907), is published in 1884.

Des Esseintes imagines ‘gin and whisky raising the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones; marc-brandy matching the tubas’. As such it is one of the strangest movements in the Modernist era, linking figures as various as Baudelaire and Edward Burne-Jones.He is the intellectual who knows all about Baudelaire and venerates Moreau’s paintings of Salome, but doesn’t have the common sense to feed his pet or open a window to let some air in. For example, his two servants (of course he has servants) live and work on a separate floor of the house to him and he usually communicates with them by ringing bells. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He spends three pages choosing the colour of his walls, an entire chapter contemplating Latin literature of the post-Augustan and early mediaeval period and another chapter making perfume.